Enough Meat Pies

Visiting Australia. My host family has a special deal with the bakery. Every week they pick up the extras from the last couple of days. Lovely fresh artisan bread that didn’t sell, rolls, danishes, and the classic Australian meat pie.

All those are weaknesses of mine, though I rarely eat them at home. So of course, here I’ve fulfilled my fantasy. Heck, why pass up a danish if you don’t know where your next one will come from?

Until last night. Suddenly, without any warning, I have simply had enough.

It’s a rare thing, enough. I remember 20 some years ago on the gulf coast of Louisiana (my homeland) we bought shrimp fresh off the boat for 50 cents a pound. Boil ‘em up, strain the water out and pile ‘em onto the picnic table. And I mean pile. A pile a foot high. That’s a lotta shrimp.

Before that time, shrimp had been somewhat self-rationed due to availability. Not this time. I ate shrimp until I just plain did not want any more. That day has completely changed my relationship to shrimp. I still love it, still order it, but I am no longer worried or bothered by the quantity. The quality matters more now, any quantity is fine with me.

Another time, I had a patient on the table (back in my holistic health care days) and part of the neuro-integration  we were doing included rubbing his ears. (lots of meridian connections there). It usually takes a couple of minutes and I told him to tell me when it was enough.

10 minutes later he said, half-heartedly, ‘I guess that’s enough’.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘You’d don’t sound very convinced’.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘It seems like that should be enough.’

‘You get as much as you need. You decide.’

‘Well then, can I keep going?’

We did – for 35 more minutes. It was a first for me – that much time.

More recently, I led a woman through an experience of being completely in charge of how she was touched. Nothing would be done except exactly what she asked for, no more. I stood at her feet for 45 minutes while she considered, until she had enough of non-touch, and asked for my hands on her feet. 45 minutes. That was another eye opener for me.

How many times had she allowed herself to be touched before she was ready, had she ever had enough of non-touching, enough of how it feels to actually have a choice with no pressure? She told me later that the experience was life-changing for her.

So enough. It seems there is some kind of enough-ness switch inside the brain. It may be shrimp, it may be ear rubbing, it may be non-touch, but there is something completely healing about getting all the way to it.

Getting enough of anything, any one thing, seems to touch it somehow. It’s as if, until we reach it as adults, maybe we don’t really believe it’s there. But I have come to see that it can be reached, with care and agreement and a sense of exploring, and it changes things.

So enough meat pies for me, enough cream danishes. I will likely have another some day, but it is different now. There is no longer a scarcity and I will enjoy it when I choose it, and that will be fine.

This morning it was back to apples and cheese.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 2:51 am and is filed under just life, Deep Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.